House Committee Still Sidestepping Hearing on Air Force Sexual Assaults

July 26, 2012

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While calls for a full Congressional hearing about the sex scandal at Lackland Air Force Base have gone unheeded, the House Armed Services Committee is holding a closed-door briefing about the incident with the Secretary of the Air Force, Michael Donley, next week.

“When you’re dealing with instances like these, generally the path that the committee takes is first you hear from senior leaders in the organization involved, in this case the Air Force,” Claude Chafin, the committee’s communications director, told KHTS in Santa Margarita, California, which is in the district of committee chair Buck McKeon.

“And very often, as in this case, that organization is doing their own investigation. In this case, they’re undergoing their own prosecutions. Generally, you see the outcome of that process before the committee enters into their own investigative process,” he said.

But Democratic Representative Jackie Speier has spoken on the House floor three times already about Lackland—she thinks it’s misguided wait for the results of a criminal investigation conducted by the Air Force bureaucracy that let the crimes happen in the first place. Her letter to leadership demanding hearings has garnered the signatures of seventy-seven Congressmen, and the advocacy group Protect Our Defenders also started a petition that, as of Wednesday, had more than 8,000 signatures. The group began a Twitter campaign Tuesday targeting McKeon with the hashtag #AskBuck.

For Protect Our Defenders, a closed-door briefing to delay a hearing is not enough.

“This is unacceptable. The widening scandal at Lackland demands a full congressional hearing and investigation — it is a matter of our national security,” said Nancy Parrish, president of the group, in a statement Wednesday. “Our armed forces’ top brass hasn’t fixed the epidemic of rape and sexual assault in our military and it is very apparent it needs to be addressed legislatively. Hearings are part of this process.”

Soumya KarlamanglaSoumya Karlamangla is a Summer 2012 intern at The Nation. She has written on climate change and the environment for the Thomson Reuters Foundation's AlertNet news site in London, and was most recently a news editor at The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley's student newspaper.